Made in America: A Conversation with Christopher Payne, Kathy Ryan, and Rachel Slade

Join photographer Christopher Payne, former New York Times photography editor Kathy Ryan, and bestselling author Rachel Slade for a wide-ranging conversation around Payne’s Made in America project to document industrial manufacturing across the United States. Payne’s images show a startling diversity of companies, from a pencil factory and humanoid robot maker, to a lab that makes mirrors for astronomical telescopes. The panelists will discuss why Payne was drawn to documenting sites of industrial production in America, the importance of photography as a means of conveying the diversity of things made in the U.S. and the skilled workers who make them, and the challenges and opportunities of onshoring industrial production in the 21st century. SPEAKERS Matilda McQuaid (moderator) is Acting Director of Curatorial and previously Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She oversees curatorial and exhibition programming often working collaboratively with other Smithsonian museums on projects and exhibitions. As a curator she has organized nationally and internationally acclaimed architecture and design exhibitions with accompanying publications including “Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance” (2005), “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay” (2011), “Tools: Extending Our Reach” (2014), and “Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” (2019). Formerly at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) for fifteen years where she curated over thirty exhibit